As part of our 2019.3 release for Deskpro, we are happy to announce our new Sub Status feature. This new feature allows you to create new sub-statuses that are associated with the existing core statuses, and allow your Agents to better define what state the ticket is in.

Your new sub-statuses will give you the option of being more specific with a tickets journey and can also be used within triggers and follow-ups etc so you can always be sure the ticket is in the correct state.

We have now removed the ‘On Hold’ state for a ticket and replaced this option with a new ‘Pending’ status which will keep the same useful behaviour of a ticket that has been put on hold, but this is no longer a sub-status of the Awaiting Agent status.

Pending will also have replaced On Hold in all Actions or Criteria in any Triggers, Filters etc, as this change allows the Pending ticket to behave the same as 'On Hold' tickets, with the added bonus that all actions that can be performed on a status, can now use Pending e.g. criteria in SLAs, giving you much more control over your tickets when automating them.

Selecting the Pending Status will be a lot more intuitive for you agents as well. Previously with 'On Hold' a ticket would need to be set as Awaiting Agent and then require an Action to be put on hold.

As part of our Deskpro 2019.2 release, we are pleased to announce our latest update to the knowledgebase feature. You can now add custom fields to knowledgebase articles which allows you to add more helpful information onto your articles to assist readers.

To add these custom fields go to Admin > User Interface > Knowledgebase > Custom Fields. You can create new custom fields by pressing the ‘+Add’ button and select the appropriate field type:

After your custom fields are ready, these can be added to new and existing knowledgebase articles, by updating the ‘Fields’ section on your article within the Publishing interface.

The Custom fields that you have entered a value for will now be seen in the article when viewing it from the portal:

We're pleased to introduce Chat Queues as part of the product release 2019.1. Chat queues give you more control over how chats get assigned to your agents within chat departments and have replaced the previous Chat Round Robin feature.

Below is a summary of the changes you can expect to see:

Routing Models

Choose how new chats are routed to your agents (Simulring, Round Robin or Least Utilized).

Answer Timeout

Choose an 'Answer Timeout' period. If an agent does not answer the chat within that time-frame, the next agent in the list will be called.

Maximum Chat Capacity

Set the maximum number of chats agents can handle simultaneously to prevent overload. If too many chats get assigned to an agent, it can lead to lower quality responses as agents may be having to rush and multi-task beyond their limits. Setting a maximum chat limit can improve the experience for both customer and agents.

If all agents are at maximum capacity, users can wait in a queue until an agent becomes available.

Chat Queuing System

Agents can monitor how many chats are waiting in the 'New Chats' filter. As soon as an agent becomes available, the chat will be routed to them.

If you had Round Robin groups set up before, these will have been upgraded into different chat queues and those queues will be automatically set for the relevant chat departments, so your previous settings will still apply unless you customize them.

You can read our guide on chat queues to learn more about setting these up.

How can I start using Chat Queues?

If you are using Deskpro Cloud, we will roll out this update to your helpdesk soon.

If you are using Deskpro On-Premise, you can update your helpdesk to the latest version from your Admin Interface.

In order to improve the multibrand feature, we have updated the behaviour of Feedback and how this is submitted between brands in the release of Deskpro 2019.1. This change will allow you to create brand-specific settings for Feedback that will not be shared across brands and keep your Feedback requests organized.

It is a very simple process to create brand-specific Feedback, and the first step is enabling the Portal and Feedback for your brand in User Interface > Brand > Setup. You can then manage the feedback in the new brand (User Interface > Brand > Feedback), and provide Status, Type, and Category options that can be selected when the Feedback is being created (please be sure to select the correct Usergroups when adding Feedback Types, to ensure the correct users can view this page).

From this point on your users will only be able to create Feedback on each brand using the Categories that you have made available on each, keeping everything organized.

Included in Deskpro 2019.1 is the release of the latest update to language feature on Deskpro. This update will now allow your admins to easily and quickly update your installed language packs.

This is done very easily with only a couple of clicks by heading to Setup > Languages and 'Settings & Tools' at the bottom of this page. You will see our new addition at the bottom of the page with a simple drop-down box to select the language that you wish to update or simply update all installed languages, and then press the button ‘Download latest language’.

This will be especially useful for anyone currently contributing to the languages packs, but everyone who is using an installed language pack can also visit this page to check on any updates.

With the aim of giving you more control when creating additional brands on your helpdesk, we have created additional methods to create a new brand that has been released in Deskpro 2019.1. You now have the ability to choose between creating a helpdesk with a custom URL, or keeping the same main URL and using slugs to access the additional brands that will be used with your main URL.

What is a URL Slug?

This is defined in many ways, however in this context, it would relate to the "User Friendly" part of a website address to the right of the actual domain name. ie. example.com/brand-slug-2

Previously, you would have only been able to specify an entire domain or sub-domain for each brand. ie helpdesk.example.com and internal.example.com. As we continued to expand our multibrand capabilities - and have allowed for yet another feature (feedback) to be branded, the demand to deploy multibrands in a more fluid and personal way became apparent.

Where previously you would have needed to register a new domain name to properly access a new brand, our client base let us know these were difficult to seek the approval of, or hard to justify in a larger company, sometimes incurring costs with upstream providers. We have therefore removed this limitation, allowing customers to set up "Brand Slugs" without the need to set up a new sub domain. example.com/internal-hd1,example.com/ext-2,example.com/hrdesk3 - and so on.

Why would you ever use a URL Slug?

One reason would be to make your URL's more user friendly. The previous system would auto-generate a "preview" link (/brand-1, /brand-2) which the user had no control over. When accessing these URLs', visitors would have no context as to what the page was related to.

Moving on from that, this would increase your SEO - when search engines index pages, they look at the text in the URL to assist with rankings. If your URL is (example.com/internal-hr-support) - an employee will have more luck finding the correct support desk through a search engine.

Finally, as previously outlined, this practice prevents exhausting actual sub-domains or additional domains to make use of the new multibrand features, which was becoming time consuming and costly for the IT departments.

How to get started:

A screenshot of the new Brand Setup page can be seen below and there is the simple ‘Helpdesk slug’ option which is all that needs to be entered in order to use this feature. As you are updating the details you can also use the newly added ‘View brand portal’ button to easily preview and check that everything is correct.

Once you have entered your brand portals details into the setup, make sure to tick the option to Enable Portal if you wish to have the portal available for this brand. Once this is ticked, you will be given the same portal options that are available on the Default brand, and you can set this up to match your brand's needs:

As part of product release Deskpro 2018.1, we've made a number of significant changes and improvements to the way multibrand works in Deskpro.

We've made it easier to connect users and user records to specific brands. Essentially, brands now act in a way that feels more like they are separate. From a user perspective, it is now not so apparent that Deskpro is powering multiple brand portals or helpdesks.

Here are some of the most important changes:

Users only get emails from a brand they're associated with

For example, if you send a reset-password email to a user from Agent interface, the user now gets emailed from an address that belongs to the brand they're associated with, and get a reset link to that specific brand portal.

User authentication behaves differently across brands

For example, if you want to enable registration on BrandA but disable it on BrandB, you can now do that. If a user exists in the Deskpro database, they cannot log in to BrandB unless they are specifically associated with the BrandB. This means that you can further limit the user's interaction and exposure to BrandB.

It is now possible to enable and disable authentication sources on a per-brand basis

For example, you can have "Login with LDAP" enabled on BrandA but not BrandB. Multiple default User Source apps now operate across brands on a per-brand basis.

Emails sent to the helpdesk result in user records being created

Email addresses now have brands associated with them, so new user records can set the proper brand on any new accounts.

As part of product release Deskpro 2018.1, we've introduced a whole new reporting system. You can learn more about all that here.

This also means you can expect some changes and improvements to the way DPQL works in reports, and this article has been written to simply explain each of those changes.

All DPQL functions start with DPQL_ prefix

To make it easy to determine which functions are DPQL-specific and which are part of standard MySQL functions, DPQL functions now have to include the prefix 'DPQL_' -e.g. DPQL_COUNT

This now means that functions without the prefix operate just as they would when using standard MySQL.

Support for subqueries

You can now nest a query inside a larger query. For example:

SELECT tickets.id

FROM tickets

WHERE tickets.id IN (

SELECT tickets.id

FROM tickets

WHERE tickets.ref LIKE 'AAAA-%'

)

Support for unions

You can now combine the results of two queries into a single query. For example:

SELECT tickets.id FROM (

(SELECT tickets.id FROM tickets)

UNION

(SELECT tickets.id FROM tickets)

) as t1

No more DISPLAY line

Previously, in DPQL1, a query would start with ‘DISPLAY TABLE’ or the type of report you had selected to display. This is no longer a feature. Admins now simply choose the type of graph as an option rather the it being coded into the query itself.

New function ‘DPQL_JSON_EXTRACT’

This function operates in a similar way to MySQL's [JSON_EXTRACT]. It lets you SELECT a field in the database that is stored as JSON, and extract a specific value for display.

This function only works in the SELECT clause (i.e. a value you want to display) because the decoding only happens in PHP. It can be used to support displaying specific data from a JSON blob.

New function 'DPQL_HIERARCHY'

Deskpro has a number of fields that have hierarchies such as Departments, Organizations, Categories, Products and Custom choice fields. You can use DPQL_HIERARCHY denote hierarchy in reports. This allows you to see a total count for one field and all sub-fields. The below image demonstrates a few real life examples of what the reporting will allow.

DPQL_HIERARCHY can only be used in a GROUP BY.

DPQL_HIERARCHY can only be used in the first group by. A currently limitation. You can't use it as a secondary group by param.

The signature for DPQL_HIERARCHY is:

DPQL_HIERARCHY(field, minDepth, maxDepth)

The field can be any field in deskpro where hierarchy exists (custom fields, departments, orgs, etc).

minDepth is the minimum depth to show

A minDepth of 1 means we'll show A in A>B>C. A minDepth of 2 means we'll show A>B in A>B>C

maxDepth is how many levels to show.

If minDepth is 1 and maxDepth is one, then A>B=10 and A>C=5 would get rolled up into A=15 (i.e. we collapse the hierarchy into 1 level).

If minDepth is 2 and maxDepth is 2, then we'd show A>B and A>C as separate things. If there was A>C>X then the 'x' value would get rolled-up into the 'c' value. etc.

This example uses a custom field. See how the field has German > Frankfurter > Wurstchen, but on the report we're limiting it to the top-level hotdog type.

New function: DPQL_HIERARCHY_DESCENDS_FROM

DPQL_HIERARCHY_DESCENDS_FROM can only be used in a WHERE clause

DPQL_HIERARCHY_DESCENDS_FROM limits what you want to see in a hierarchy. e.g. if you had A>B>C>D and X>Y>Z you might only want to see values under A

For example, DPQL_HIERARCHY_DESCENDS_FROM(ticket.organization, 5) limits the query to tickets with organizations set to 5 or anything below that.

A query could use this to limit all reports to tickets with the values that descend from the selected value.

SELECT DPQL_COUNT() AS 'Open'

FROM tickets WHERE

tickets.status != 'resolved'

AND tickets.organization <> NULL

AND DPQL_HIERARCHY_DESCENDS_FROM(tickets.custom_data[#], ${variable})

GROUP BY tickets.organization.name AS 'Organization'

New Function: LAYER WITHThis function allows you to combine multiple result sets in a single query. For example, the results below are generated by the following query.

SELECT

DPQL_COUNT() AS 'Open Tickets',

tickets.organization.name AS 'Department',

'Tickets' AS 'value_axis_title'

FROM tickets

WHERE

tickets.organization.name <> NULL

AND tickets.status IN ('awaiting_user', 'awaiting_agent')

GROUP BY tickets.organization.name AS 'Department'

LAYER WITH

SELECT

DPQL_COUNT() AS 'Closed Tickets',

tickets.organization.name AS 'Department'

FROM tickets

WHERE

tickets.organization.name <> NULL

AND tickets.status = 'resolved'

GROUP BY tickets.organization.name AS 'Department'

You can use LAYER WITH <BAR|LINE> to override the type of the layered graph. E.g. if the main graph is set to show a BAR, you could layer on a LINE graph by using LAYER WITH LINE

If you just use LAYER WITH then the secondary graph will be displayed in the same chart type as the primary.

Changes to: DPQL_FORMAT

FORMAT now acts like it would when using MySQL, and old behaviour is achieved using DPQL_FORMAT.

Signature: DPQL_FORMAT(value, formatType[, otherArgs]...)

DPQL_FORMAT(value, 'number', 2) → formats a value as a number. The third param is the number of decimal places to show. e.g. 123000.4567 → 123,000.46

DPQL_FORMAT(value, 'date', 'F')→ formats the value as a date. The third param is the date format. e.g. 2018-05-14 → May

DPQL_FORMAT(value, 'percent', 1) → formats a fractional number as an integer percentage. The third param is the number of decimals to show (if not provided, defaults to 2). e.g. 0.755 → 75.5%

Changes to: DPQL_CONCAT

We have a new DPQL_CONCAT that works just like MySQL CONCAT, except that it functions within Deskpro rather than the database.

This is because some values are raw values from the database, and some values are values that Deskpro needs to render.

CONCAT is a mysql function — it works on raw values from the db. DPQL_CONCAT is a deskpro function, it works on values we get out of the database.

SELECT CONCAT('£', DPQL_FORMAT(value, 'number', 2))

This does NOT work because MySQL cannot concat DPQL_FORMAT — that value does not exist until Deskpro gets involved because DPQL_FORMAT is Deskpro function.

But you could do it this way:

SELECT DPQL_CONCAT('£', DPQL_FORMAT(value, 'number', 2))

Because Deskpro is generating the value in both cases.

It's important to understand the MySQL step is separate from the Deskpro step. MySQL can't determine extra information that gets added in the Deskpro step, because MySQL processes occur before Deskpro processes.

Custom field aliases

It's now possible to give a human "alias" to a custom field. In most places where you would need to refer to a field ID (including reports and our API), you can now use an alias instead.

So tickets.custom_data[123] can now be tickets.custom_data[alias_name]

SELECT AVG(tickets.custom_data[deal_value].value) AS 'Deal Value'

FROM tickets

WHERE

tickets.agent <> NULL

AND tickets.custom_data[deal_value].value <> NULL

AND tickets.custom_data[deal_value].value > 0

GROUP BY tickets.agent AS 'Lawyer'

In order to use custom aliases, remember to determine them in the admin interface before using them in reports.

Using the new 'simple stat' with DPQLThe new 'simple stat' widget type is useful for displaying simple performance data on dashboards.

A simple way to use this stat to show tickets created this month through a DPQL query is:

SELECT DPQL_COUNT() as 'stat_value', 'created this month' as 'stat_description'

FROM tickets

WHERE tickets.date_created = %THIS_MONTH%

There are a number of data and variations you can select to display:

stat_value — determines the large value shown

stat_description — determines the sub-line

unit_left and unit_right are strings that go before/after the value. For example, if you want to show a SUM or AVG value of a currency field, you can set the left unit to £. Or if the number you calculated is a percentage, you could set the right unit to %.

default_value is what to show if stat_value returns null. For example, in the above example, if no tickets were created this month, then the count is null, and the report would show "No data". Sometimes it's more useful to just show 0 instead of "No Data". So you could use ... '0' as 'default_value' to force 0 as the default value.

Gauge type

The new 'gauge' widget type is useful for displaying information where you want to see the current value of a statistic against a range of possible values for the same statistic at any given time.

A simple way to use this stat to show the £ value of accumulated ticket charges this year through a DPQL query is:

stat_value determines the value, where to "fill to" or where the needle points

stat_total determines the total value, displayed as the maximum value at the end of the gauge

unit_left and unit_right are strings that go before/after the values. For example, if you want to show a SUM or AVG value of a currency field, you can set the left unit to £. Or if the number you calculated is a percentage, you could set the right unit to %.

tooltip_text is what to show when you hover your mouse over the gauge

Overriding labels & Tooltips

You can now select extra values in the query to override labels shown on axes, or what appears in 'tooltip' text.

In the SELECT clause, you can use the following to create labels and tooltips:

tooltip_text determines the tooltip text. Within the string you can use [[category]] as a placeholder for the category (which is the x axis variable) and [[value]] as the value (which is the value shown on the y axis- usually a count or sum etc).

tooltip_text_template determines the tooltip text based on a template that we evaluate client-side. See below for more on templates.

value_axis_title determines the title shown on . Usually this will be whatever you select the value as, but you can override it here. e.g. SELECT DPQL_COUNT() AS 'example' will by default set the title on the y axis to 'example'. Use value_axis_title to override this and name it accordingly.

value_label_template sets the template for rendering values along the y axis

category_label_template sets the template for rendering the categories along the x axis.

Templates

Templates are a way of making it easier to render values in different ways vs the "raw" value in DPQL. Essentially, a template is a string that gets rendered through a simple template engine.

Templates apply only to bar and line charts. Here's an example setting the tooltip text using a template:

WHERE ticket_charges.ticket.organization <> NULL AND ticket_charges.ticket.date_created = %THIS_YEAR% AND ticket_charges.ticket.status IN ('resolved', 'closed') GROUP BY ticket_charges.ticket.organization AS 'Organization'

In the template string, {{anything in here}} is special:

It can be a bare variable, which include {{value}} and {{category}}

Or it can be a function:

formatCurrency formats the value as a currency value. The first parameter used should be the value to format, and the second is the specific currency to format. For example, if we wanted to show £123.33 we'd use:

{{formatCurrency 123.33 "GBP"}}

formatNumber formats a number in ways according to toLocaleString. This would is most likely used in advanced use-cases. The first parameter used should be the value, and the rest can be found in this document. For example

{{formatNumber value maximumFractionDigits=1}} would turn a value like 1 into 1.0 or a value of 223.34874 into 223.3 etc

formatPercent rounds a number to an integer and adds a %

{{formatPercent 5.5}} — would render as 6% etc.

math carries out simple math. The first param is the value, then comes the operator, then comes the right operator.

{{math 100 "/" 5}} → 100 would render as 20.

You can also combine functions together with parenthesis. Here's an example combining formatNumber with math:

WHERE tickets.custom_data[rate_responsiveness].value <> NULL AND tickets.custom_data[external_lawyer] <> NULL GROUP BY DPQL_HIERARCHY(tickets.custom_data[external_lawyer], 1) AS 'Firm'

If you use a template with LAYER WITH, then {{value}} and {{category}} correspond to the first initial graph. {{0_value}} and {{0_category}} refers to the second graph; and the number increments for each layer you add. So referring to the first graph would use value/category; the next layered one would be 0_value/0_category, the one after that is 1_value/1_category, etc

You'd want to define a separate template in each LAYER WITH query to set their own tooltip or else they'd all use the same one.

Deskpro dashboards contain ‘top-level variables’ - variables which apply across all the stats that exist in the dashboard. Common top-level variables are date ranges, teams, or departments.

Dashboards are the perfect tool for viewing lots of critical helpdesk data or information at the same time, allowing you and your team to develop and share a comprehensive understanding of support performance.

Stat Builder

Stats are the individual sets of data which are used to build reports.

When building reports, we have introduced a new stat builder and browser that is both faster and easier to use than before.

Stats now have labels, so you can find the specific stats you’d like to include in a report with ease and speed.

Variable Builder

We have also introduced a Variable Builder, which makes it easier to add variables when building queries for reports.

Scheduled Reports

You can now schedule reports to automatically run and distribute results via email.

The email will contain a permalink URL that can be viewed and opened by anyone with access to this URL.

For example, you can schedule a report that outlines helpdesk activity over the previous week to run every Friday at 4pm, and automatically share it with selected colleagues.

New Chart Types

There are three new chart types available in addition to the existing area, line, bar and pie chart types. These are:

Simple Stat

Gauge

Bubble

Custom Javascript

When adding widgets to create reports, you're now able to insert any arbitrary JS code.

Widget Options Override

After you've added a widget to a report, you can edit it to set widget overrides.

That "JSON string" is JSON that you can use to override any default chart settings. For example, a common thing might be to disable legends on widgets to save space on reports, or to use prefixes (100000 shown as 100k).

What will happen to old Reports?

Old reports will still be available until 31st August. After then, old Reports will become unavailable, and new Reports will become the standard and only reporting interface within Deskpro. This should give you enough time to make any necessary changes to start using new Reports.

Any existing reports and settings you have in your current helpdesk will be migrated to new reports automatically, but any reports you create in the old reporting system hereafter will not be automatically migrated to new reports.

You will be able to access new Reports from your agent interface. You will need to enable it from your Admin Dashboard, after which it will appear directly underneath old Reports in the interface.

Thanks for reading

If you are using Deskpro Cloud, we will roll out this update to your helpdesk soon.

If you are using Deskpro On-Premise, you can update your helpdesk to the latest version from your Admin Interface.

For more information on product updates associated with this one, take a look at other updates and changes included in the release of Deskpro 2018.1.

We have now introduced a way to link tickets to one or more feedback items. This is useful for scenarios where a customer submits a ticket that you want to turn into a feature request.

The new update allows you to:

Link tickets to feedback items, and display the link in both ticket and feedback views so agents have full visibility. Tickets can be linked to multiple feedback items, and feedback can be linked to multiple tickets.

Search for tickets linked to a particular feedback item, or search for tickets "with a link" to any existing feedback.

How does the new feature work?

To link to feedback from a ticket, the "Link Existing Feedback" and "Create Linked Feedback" options are available from the Actions menu.

"Link Existing Feedback" displays a search box where you can enter feedback title or an ID to find the feedback item you want to link the ticket to.

"Create Linked Feedback" opens the New Feedback tab. The New Feedback shows a message at the top saying it's being created as a linked item to the ticket.

After a ticket has been linked to feedback, a "Linked Feedback" tab is added to the ticket Properties box. This simply lists the linked feedback with an "x" icon to remove the link.

How can I start using the new feature?

If you are using Deskpro Cloud, we will roll out this update to your helpdesk soon.

If you are using Deskpro On-Premise, you can update your helpdesk to the latest version from your Admin Interface.

We look forward to receiving your feedback about the new article editor, and wish you all the best in the meantime.

We’re delight to announce the release of a brand new application within the Deskpro helpdesk.

The Helpdesk Data Importer allows you to effortlessly import data from other sources into Deskpro. At the moment, these sources include Kayako and Zendesk, but we plan on expanding these to include other popular helpdesks and ticketing systems.

Previously, importing data from other helpdesk sources would involve a lengthy process - including extra software, manually editing config files, and use of command prompt.

Now, the importer app exists within Deskpro itself, and can be accessed under Admin > Apps > Importer.

What does the app import?

The helpdesk data importer imports the following helpdesk items when migrating from:

How long does the migration take?

It’s a simple process that takes somewhere between five and twenty minutes, depending on how much data you need to migrate. If you are importing a massive amount of data, it could take longer.

Is data kept safe?

Absolutely. Deskpro operates using bank-level security practices, and we ensure that all of our processes are aligned to the highest standards.

What if plans change?

We don’t alter your data. Once you’ve migrated to Deskpro, you can do whatever you like with your data in your other helpdesk.

How does the new importer work?

Firstly, you can find the importer within Admin > Apps > Importer.

Now, you simply have to choose the source of data you want to import data from.

Input the relevant helpdesk account details. For different data sources, you will need to provide different credentials. For example, if you are using the Zendesk importer - you will need to provide an admin token.

Once you have entered and validated your credentials, you can start the import process.

The process will begin automatically, and you will be able to see the status and progress of the import. This also includes a list of individual helpdesk data being imported.

After the import is complete, the application will simply let you know.

And it’s really as simple as that!

After the import process is complete, you will be able to find all the helpdesk content items in Deskpro - ready for you to manage.

If you are using Deskpro Cloud, we will roll out this update to your Helpdesk soon.

If you are using Deskpro On-Premise, you can update your Helpdesk to the latest version from your Admin Interface.

We look forward to receiving your feedback about the new helpdesk data importer, and wish you all the best in the meantime.

Chat Round Robin is a new Deskpro feature. It allows you to automatically and evenly distribute live chats to agents.

The Chat Round Robin works a lot like the Ticket Round Robin feature within Deskpro, that you may already be familiar with - just with live chats instead of tickets.

When live chats are initiated by users, the Chat Round Robins you have configured and enabled determine which agent will be assigned to that chat.

This means agents who are using live chat in Deskpro are automatically assigned chats in a manner that’s efficient, easy, fair - and ultimately removes all the administrative hassle associated with manual chat distribution.

How do Chat Round Robins work?

Chat Round Robins have several options for configuration, and you can enable multiple Round Robins to work with each other at the same time.

Routing type of each Chat Round Robin determines the way in which the Round Robin will assign tickets to agents:

The ‘Round Robin’ routing type means chats will be assigned to each selected agent in that Round Robin, in consecutive order, one after another.

The ‘Least utilized Round Robin’ routing type means chats will be assigned to each selected agent in that Round Robin - based upon their total activity time handling chats since they’ve been logged in. This means the agent who has spent the least time handling chats is the first to be automatically assigned any new, incoming chat.

You can also determine the agents that are included in each Round Robin. These can be determined individually, or agents can be bulk added by team, department or permission group.

Finally, Round Robins can be set to be applied as default across all live chats, or applied only to specific chat departments. This means you can set up a ‘universal’ Round Robin for all live chats, with any department-specific Round Robins that are enabled overriding the rules of the ‘universal’ Round Robin.

How can I start using Chat Round Robin?

If you are using Deskpro Cloud, we will roll out this update to your Helpdesk soon.

If you are using Deskpro On-Premise, you can update your Helpdesk to the latest version from your Admin Interface.

We’d like to thank our customers for using Deskpro like support superheroes, and helping us improve the software we take great pride in developing.

We look forward to receiving your feedback about the new Follow Up feature, and wish you all the best in the meantime.

Follow Ups is a brand new Deskpro feature. It allows you to automatically run specific actions on individual tickets after a defined period of time has elapsed, or on a specific date.

Wait, isn’t that what Escalations in Deskpro are for?

Not quite. Escalations are used to run actions on any ticket that has spent a defined period of time in a certain state - usually defined by an admin.

On the other hand, Follow Ups are set within individual tickets to run actions on only that ticket after a defined period of time, or on a specific date - and can be defined by agents.

Escalations can be useful in ensuring that any ticket where the user has been waiting a while for an agent reply is universally and automatically actioned. This creates an environment where all tickets are dealt with promptly, and nothing falls through the cracks.

Follow Ups, however, can be useful in ensuring individual tickets are automatically actioned for reasons specific to that particular scenario. This enables agents to create intelligent and highly-valuable automations for almost any helpdesk situation - right from a ticket.

How do Follow Ups work?

Agents can select the ‘Follow Up’ tab in the ticket pane in order to configure a Follow Up.

Here they will be able to set the the specific Follow Up action that will run, the date or elapsed time when the Follow Up action will run, and also define criteria for cancelling the Follow Up.

Follow Up Action

When defining the specific Follow Up actions to run when the ticket Follow Up time is achieved, agents can add and edit any combination of the following ticket actions:

Assign agent

Assign team

Add reply

Add note

Hold or unhold

Set status

Run macro

Follow Up Time

When defining an elapsed time for the Follow Up actions to run, agents can select any number of days, weeks or months after the Follow Up has been set. Alternatively, they can also define a specific date and time.

Follow Up Cancellation Criteria

When setting a Follow Up, agents can select criteria that - if met before the specified date or elapsed time - will automatically cancel the Follow Up. The options for automatic cancellation are:

Cancel Follow Up if the user replies

Follow Up Status

Agents will be able to view and manage their active Follow Ups from the Agent Interface. This will reveal the status of each Follow Up; whether they have been completed, pending or cancelled - with the option to cancel pending Follow Ups.

In what situations would Follow Ups be useful?

Follow Ups allow you to do even more with your helpdesk. It brings another level of sophisticated automation to your support team, whilst also opening up new possibilities to handle important functions within a single ticketing environment. Here are a few examples:

Sales Management

When using Deskpro to manage sales, it’s now possible to schedule Follow Ups after interactions with potential customers that prompt timely action crucial to a successful sale. For example, if a support agent has set up a potential customer with a demo version of your product, they can easily configure a Follow Up to set ticket department to sales, and ticket status to awaiting agent - as soon as the 14 day demo trial is nearing to an end.

Customer Success

Let’s imagine you have just sold one of your products or services to a new customer using Deskpro. Follow Ups allow agents to send automatic replies to that customer inquiring how their experience with their purchase is going after a month of use - allowing you to be proactive in addressing any barriers they may have to success.

Workflow Management

Follow Ups are incredibly valuable when maintaining adherence to specific and stringent workflows like ITIL. For example, when provisioning a new project or purchase with a customer, agents can use the Follow Up feature to automate a set of powerful macro actions that notify and communicate with several departments or third-parties crucial to the tick-box process.

Task Management

Never forget to complete another internal task again. Set personal, individual or team wide reminders that prompt agents into action - whether it’s renewing an annual software license, or simply taking the team’s coffee order.

How can I start using Follow Ups?

If you are using Deskpro Cloud, we will roll out this update to your Helpdesk soon.

If you are using Deskpro On-Premise, you can update your Helpdesk to the latest version from your Admin Interface.

Simply enable the Follow Up feature from your Deskpro Admin Interface, and anyone using your helpdesk will be able to start using it immediately.

We’d like to thank our customers for using Deskpro like support superheroes, and helping us improve the software we take great pride in developing.

We look forward to receiving your feedback about the new Follow Up feature, and wish you all the best in the meantime.

What is Deskpro Guides?

Deskpro Guides is a feature that allows you to create your own indexed library of instructive user manuals, built right into the Deskpro user portal.

It allows you to provide users with convenient and highly-useful information about your product and services from your Deskpro user portal. This means the volume of incoming tickets are reduced, and customer satisfaction increases due to the depth of self-service options.

When your customers receive self-service support, agents are able to focus on resolving more complex and tricky customer issues. Guides is one of the easiest and cheapest ways to keep customers serviced and informed. It’s the optimal tool in handling high-volume, simple queries regarding your products and services.

It’s available 24/7, and turns your ordinary users into fully-engaged power users.

How does Guides differ from Knowledgebase?

Knowledgebase is a catalogue of support-related articles on anything from troubleshooting to FAQs - and any other nitty gritty questions your customers want answered. It’s designed to be populated by multiple contributors, frequently added to, and navigated using search terms.

On the other hand, Guides is a clearly indexed library of instructive user manuals that provides users with prescriptive information on how to use your product or services. It’s designed to host more formalized and highly-authored content, which can be changed over time, and is navigated using indices.

Essentially, users look to Knowledgebase for answers to specific questions, and Guides for comprehensive information on particular categories.

How do I use Deskpro Guides?

Guides can be managed by Deskpro from the Publish section of the helpdesk agent interface. Here you can add new guides documents, or edit existing ones.

Authoring and editing of guide content is done using a rich and easy-to-use markdown publishing tool. Markdown formatting means there is visual consistency across all guides, and requires no code to use effectively.

As well as creating and editing content, you can also organize and arrange how guides appear to users. Within each guide, It’s possible to create nested topics in which content subtopics appear, allowing for easier user navigation.

The permissions of individual guides can be edited from the agent interface, allowing you to select whether guides are visible to everyone, registered users, VIPs, specific user groups, or your own agents.

Once guides are published, they appear in the new ‘Guides’ section of the user portal, right next to Knowledgebase.

Visitors to your user portal will then be able to effortlessly browse and read guides you have published; given they meet the correct permission criteria.

For more information on using Deskpro Guides, keep an eye on the Guides section of the Deskpro user portal. We’ll be uploading comprehensive manuals on using Deskpro Guides soon.

One more important thought…

If you are using Deskpro Cloud, we will roll out this update to your Helpdesk soon.

If you are using Deskpro On-Premise, you can update your Helpdesk to the latest version from your Admin Interface.

We’d like to thank our customers for using Deskpro like support superheroes, and helping us improve the software we take great pride in developing.

We look forward to receiving your feedback about Deskpro Guides, and wish you all the best in the meantime.

This new product feature gives agents the ability to set escalations events based on how long a ticket has been in an ‘on hold’ state.

Agents can define the required period of time elapsed for the escalation to trigger a specified action.

Whether you require prompting to follow up with a user after an elapsed period of time, or simply want to increase the urgency of a ticket that’s been on hold too long, this new feature allows you to use all standard escalation actions.

We’d also like to thank everyone who submitted feedback regarding this feature; we hope you find it useful.

Deskpro as a helpdesk removes the need to mess around with confusing shared email inboxes, or endless email chains, and consolidate your support and contact with your users in a controlled interface.

NOTE: This is a BETA feature, which can be enabled in one-click from your administrator dashboard!

Why would you need this?

We understand there are situations where a ticket may need to branch back into an email, when working with third parties, or departments which do not use the helpdesk system. We have listened to feedback from our clients, and implemented a feature to seamlessly forward out an entire ticket, or a historical email chain from a ticket.

A common situation is when the ticket needs the attention of a person or department outside of Deskpro. Here we have a ticket requiring the attention of an external finance team. Previously, you would have had to copy and paste histories over, or export the full ticket as a PDF which was not ideal.

How does this work?

You can now either forward the entire history using the tab next to the reply/note selection, or select the “Forward ticket from here” in any response, which will forward the ticket history from the response to the beginning of the ticket, and omit the most recent responses.

In this example, I have forwarded the entire ticket history to the finance team, accountant, and have blind carbon copied (BCC) in a third party.

I see a full preview of the email to be sent. You may notice that internal notes are omitted from the forwarded email, the purpose of this is to forward correspondence history, so only user/agent replies are included.

The agent is also able to select the email this comes from, it can be their personal email in the helpdesk, or the helpdesk/departments email address, this is good for determining where you want responses to go, back into the helpdesk, or into the agents personal mailbox.

The email which is then produced is very similar to a forward chain in traditional email, so the recipients can look through the responses in a format that is familiar to them, and respond back without having to log in or use Deskpro!

Administrator settings

With this new feature there are some administrator settings to control how agents can forward out emails, and from which email addresses:

This is controlled from within the Admin Interface > Tickets > Forward Settings - Under “Ticket Forwarding - Outbound” - you can specify the default email address, and enable a setting where agents can use their own email addresses

Important Information

This will initially be released as a BETA feature, to enable this you will need to visit your Admin Interface > Admin Dashboard - on the bottom left of the page there will be a list of features to enable. You can enable “Improved Forwarding” to make use of this feature.

At DeskPRO we are always keeping our features and interfaces up to date. I am proud to announce a brand new snippets interface, with accelerated features and a smooth new look.

Snippets allow for quick response and automation in the helpdesk. These are set of canned responses, with the use of variables (such as email addresses, names, custom fields) to personalize each snippet response.

NOTE: This will initially be released as a BETA feature, meaning you will need to enable this manually. You can do this through the Admin Interface > Admin Dashboard in one-click.

So, what’s new?

Everything! The entire interface along with the logic and workflow behind snippets has been rewritten and improved.

Labels

At first glance, we have completely overhauled the categorization system. Previously, snippets were set under a single category, customers noticed that as their collection of snippets grew, it became harder and harder to sort these snippets into categories.

We have the solution to this: labelling! Instead of shutting away a snippet in one category, you can now add multiple labels to a snippet. These almost act as “keywords” to make it easier for your agents to find snippets.

Languages

Globalization is a wonderful and unavoidable part of running a business! It need not scare you however. We have now made it easier than ever to communicate with your clients around the globe, with new shortcuts to insert snippets for different countries. You are able to click on the flag, and immediately insert the snippet with the associated language.

If you do not click on that flag, the system will magically detect the language set for the user account, and send them the matched snippet. This is not an auto-translation system, but a way of storing and sorting pre-translated snippets, and delivering them to your clients

Improved sorting and searching

Our clients were coming to us with impressive collections of snippets in the thousands, but with no easy way to search through them. In this update, we have included two layers of searching.

The searchbar at the top will search through everything, great if you know which snippet you are looking for, however when things get a bit messy, you can narrow down your searching by sorting through labels. What may start a mess of a thousand canned responses, is now a sleek interface to access all your pre-written content.

Snippets in action!

Open up the snippets interface, search and send a response in seconds. You can slide the interface open with the keyboard shortcut alt+s - start searching for your snippet straight away. If there are more than one result, use just the arrow keys to scroll up and down.

Once you have found your snippet, hit enter to send this out. This speeds up the process dramatically, with the new interface fully integrated with the helpdesk. Have a full length, language matched response out to your client in seconds.

Accelerated permissions and management

When managing hundreds to thousands of snippets, we knew adding labels and search functions was not enough. We needed to add permissions and visibility!

When you create a snippet now, there are new options to manage the permissions. You can assign this to selected departments, you can select ownership between agent teams, and select whether the snippet is for use chat or tickets.

This allows full complete control over who can see a snippet, where it can be used, and which departments they can be applied to. Suddenly a collection of a thousand plus pre-written responses does not look so daunting!

Attachments in snippets

Snippets are great for speeding things up, but you often need to get attachments or images out to a customer. Anything from an educational powerpoint presentation, to a set of PDF documents HR needs to send out again and again.

We saw customers making good use of the snippets, but their agents being slowed down having to then re-attach the same documents time and time again. No longer is this an issue, you can upload attachments directly into a snippet. Removing the need for any extra work or hesitation when responding.

Stop digging, you’ve struck gold!

Start using this feature right away! It is a BETA feature, which can be enabled in one-click. Navigate to the Admin Interface > Admin Dashboard - on the bottom left of the page there will be a green button to enable Snippets V2

As your helpdesk grows and your operations expand, you will need to further control your agents' permissions to use and access different features in order to keep things secure, and better manage everyone's workflows.

Macros

A macro is a command to run a pre-defined set of actions on a ticket, such as respond, add a label, change department and increase urgency, all in one go.

Where agents would previously have had to scroll through all their macros, you can section of certain macros to departments. For example, this macro is a part of the sales department, and would never be used outside the sales department. So why have it displayed there? You can set this up so it can only be applied to sales tickets.

Tasks

Tasks are pretty self-explanatory, they allow you to manage tasks/events outside of tickets, set descriptions and deadlines.

Task visibility can now be restricted to an agent, a team or a department. Just like the example in the macro above, the screenshot below refers to a Sales only task - so there is no need for full visibility to all departments. You can now set this to display only to a certain department or a specific team of agents.

The Zapier helpdesk integration with Deskpro is now available on your helpdesk (v5.4 and above).

Zapier is an automation tool that connects all of your various apps together. Now Zapier works with Deskpro too! You can set up automations for events like new tickets, ticket updates, new people, and new organizations. For example, whenever a new ticket enters a certain filter, maybe you want to create a new Trello card.

This also works the other way. Configure Zapier to perform Deskpro actions in response to other apps. For example, when a Wufoo form is submitted, create a ticket in Deskpro.

The Deskpro Zapier integration is in beta, but is now generally available and discoverable from within the Zapier platform itself - simply search for 'Deskpro' in the app directory.

We have added a setting that allows you to disable email preview text. Many email clients will show you a preview of email contents (e.g Outlook and Gmail). Enable this option to enable smart preview text so your client will show proper message contents. Without this your email client might not be table to show accurate previews. Disable this feature if you don't want this information being shown via email. You can find this setting under Admin > Tickets > Email Accounts > Advanced Settings.

We have now moved the Audit Log section from 'Server', which until now has only been accessible to our On-Premise clients, to 'Agents' in the admin section. Cloud accounts can now access these logs and track down changes that have been made to their helpdesk. You can now check for changes to the following areas:

DeskPRO has a number of fields that have hierarchies such as Departments, Organizations, Categories, Products and Custom choice fields. Reports will now denote hierarchy for example being able to see a total count for the organization and its sub-organizations. The below image demonstrates a few real life examples of what the reporting will allow.

We are always looking for ways to improve your experience with Deskpro in terms of making it more user-friendly. This is why we have introduced 'Click-to-edit' fields on tickets. You can now simply click on any field in your ticket properties box, such as Workflow or Category, and edit it straight away. Click on a field, edit it and press save at the bottom to make a change. You don't have to click on the gear to make fields editable anymore which is a great time saver and makes this process a lot more effortless.

We are really excited to introduce the ability to add rules based on custom fields to your ticket layouts. You can now add custom fields and create dependencies just like you can currently with our in-built fields. This adds a new level of customization, flexibility and dynamicness to your contact forms, as you can now expose only the most relevant fields to your users, based on what they have previously selected. This also means your agents get all of the information they need first time round and your users aren't subjected to the visual clutter of many optional fields that do not apply to them.

Hopefully, you find this to be a useful feature that streamlines your communication with your users and allows your agents to be more efficient and faster at answering inquiries and troubleshooting issues.

To create custom field dependencies, simply go to Admin > Tickets > Departments > Layouts. Each field on your layout has a cog that allows you to add advanced customization. Select this and you will see the option 'Only show this field based on custom criteria'. You can then select from any custom fields you have created and set your rule!

Internet Explorer 9, released by Microsoft on March 14th, 2011, will no longer be supported by DeskPRO. This is for both On-Premise and Cloud users. This is in line with Microsoft's announcement in early 2016 to end support (including security updates) for old versions of Internet Explorer. More information on this here.

End of support means that DeskPRO will not fix any bugs related to Internet Explorer 9. This also means that the agent and admin interfaces will not work optimally when using Internet Explorer 9.

Why the change?

Browsers as an external technology, can influence the features and services that DeskPRO offers. These older browsers often lack support for new web technologies as well as the latest security updates from Microsoft. This change therefore allows us to use modern browser technologies to give you and your users the best DeskPRO experience possible- as well as add awesome new features!

What to do if you are using IE 9 or earlier

You need to upgrade to a more modern web browser. If you would like to or have to stick with a Microsoft browser, we would recommend Internet Explorer 11. If you are using Windows 10 you also have the option of updating to Microsoft Edge. These browsers will offer you improved security and an improved user experience.

Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox are two other alternative browser options you could try out. These browsers are popular with many software providers including us!

We are excited to announce that the first release of our agent and admin redesign will be available to you soon. We are going to be slowly introducing a new look and feel to DeskPRO over the upcoming months, as we aim to have a new clean aesthetic that improves usability of the platform and ultimately functionality too, as we introduce new features and improvements. We understand that even small product changes can sometimes take a little getting used to, but we are confident that they will improve your DeskPRO experience and we are excited to introduce you to many new features in the new year. Please find a detailed walkthrough of all upcoming changes below.

New Header and App Bar

App Bar

The first big change we have made is removing the separation between the agent and admin interfaces. Unifying the two interfaces means loading the admin section of DeskPRO no longer affects your view in the agent interface. Agents with admin access can simply click on 'Admin' and be in the admin section straight away, making it easy to swap and change between the two interfaces. This change has also substantially reduced loading times across the helpdesk for anyone with both admin and agent access.

We have also taken this opportunity to refresh the icon designs so that they are clearer and more inline with the cleaner aesthetic going forward.

Header

When you first log in you will be greeted with a quick walkthrough guide to show you the ins and outs of our newly updated header. The changes were introduced to accommodate the fact that we have unified the interfaces, which created a need for a more consistent header. Functionality hasn't changed, just the placement and look of certain things and you will now be able to answer live chats, check notifications, search for tickets and create new content while you are in the admin area of your helpdesk.

Profile and Chat: We have moved the profile icon to the far right as this is a more conventional position in a web app and the chat icon follows to the left of this as it relates to your profiles online status.

Views: this remains in the same positions as the old interface.

Notifications: These have been separated from the search bar and moved to the right hand side now as they are not related to search at all.

Search and Recent Activity: This is now accessible in the top left and can be accessed from any area of the interface including Admin and Reporting. Search is no longer linked to just the ticketing interface.

Add New +: This has been moved into the header from the ticketing tab section. Now that the interfaces are no longer separated you can create a ticket, or new content from anywhere in DeskPRO without having to go to the ticketing interface. This will move slightly as other features are added to the header. It will be positioned closer to the tabs in the ticket interface after these changes.

This update will be available in version #5.2 for On-Premise users and Cloud helpdesks will be updated in the near future after the release. We would love to hear your feedback on the new header and app bar so feel free to email us at support.deskpro.com with your thoughts :)

We are excited to announce that you can now create a multi-brand helpdesk on DeskPRO. Multi-branded portals can be used to cater for the different organizations that you provide support to, different brands within your company or the different products and services that your organization offers. Each brand or product can have their own unique, branded portal with tailored content which you can manage from one single helpdesk!

This means unique knowledgebase articles, news posts, download files, chat widgets, contact forms and of course the ability to brand each portal with different logos, colours, fonts and layouts. Each brand will have its own subdomain so you can direct the right users to the right content! For set-up information click here.

Customizing your multi-brand helpdesk portals

Our new portal editor allows you to personalize each of your portals by giving you control over the look and feel, so you can recreate the style of each of your brands. You can edit details such as logos, fonts, welcome messages, colours and positioning. Simply flick between the different brands you have set up to customize each one!

*More advanced editing is available using our template and CSS editor.

Live Chat Widget

Similarly, you can also create a tailored chat widget for each branded portal. This means customizing the colours, positioning, phrases used, as well as proactive chat settings. Simply flick between your different brands to change the widgets accordingly.

Contact Forms

Using DeskPRO's departments, you can create unique contact forms for each brand. Capture the information you need from each group of users and only show the departments and fields that are most relevant to them.

Knowledgebase articles, News & Downloads

Help your users have a more pesonalized experience, by creating custom content for each of your brands. The Publish app will now allow your agents to create knowledgebase articles and categories for each individual brand you set up. This will allow you to display only the most relevant content, and better organize your self-service content and documents for your users.

You can also create separate News posts and upload unique Download materials for each brand. This means your users will only be exposed to updates and content that is most relevant and useful for them.

*Please note, our Feedback feature is not yet available for Multi-Branded Portals.

Tickets

Group tickets by brand, create filters to track these tickets and search for any relevant tickets for any of your brands too! Each ticket will be linked to a brand which will automatically be populated when a ticket is submitted via your portal, agents can update the brand when creating a new ticket, or a ticket is created by email.

Triggers, Escalations, SLAs

To help you adjust your workflows and business processes to efficiently manage your multiple brands, you can create triggers, escalations and SLAs using brands as a form of criteria. Create automations for specific brands only, track brand specific SLAs easily and create processes to automatically assign tickets the correct brand!

Snippets

You can now insert "brand" as a variable when creating snippets, helping your agents to manage multiple brands productively and efficiently.

Reporting

Capture data on your key metrics and indicators in relation to each of your brands. Use DeskPRO's reports dashboard and builder to view and export data on brand related queries to determine trends and for any analysis.

Questions and Answers

Can I restrict agents to specific brands?

Yes you sure can! Let your expert agents manage the brands they know best, by creating permission groups that link to the right department and brand! Allow your agents access to as many brands as needed.

How do I set up unique contact forms for each of my brands?

Brands are linked to departments so you can set up a contact form for each department, and attach the relevant brands! This means you can display brand specific forms by creating unique departments, or display generic support forms to all brands!

The new DeskPRO portal system is now generally available for all customers.

If you're already a DeskPRO customer and you want to try out the new portal on a test helpdesk, you can sign up for a trial at www.deskpro.com/signup/ to explore the great design improvements and new features. (See our earlier post for a reminder of what the new portal system includes).

We'll make the new portal available for existing helpdesks soon - we know a lot of you are excited for this major update! If you have a Cloud helpdesk, we will email you in advance to inform you when your helpdesk will be updated to the new system.

It's important to know about your users. DeskPRO already enables you to keep detailed profiles for users and organizations, with notes, contact information, and easy access to past tickets and activity history.

We've added the ability to store files right on CRM records, for quick reference by your agents. It might be the custom software driver you made for a user, a VIP client's biography, a company operating manual, a set of invoices... anything that will improve your service.

When your DeskPRO helpdesk is upgraded to the latest version, you'll see a new Files section in user and organization profiles.

Have you visited our portal at support.deskpro.com recently? If so, you'll have noticed that it has a shiny, modern new look.

That's because we've updated it to the new DeskPRO portal system. It's not just a cosmetic update; the new portal has lots of new features and improvements which our developers have worked hard to build, based on your feedback and suggestions.

Of course, we're not going to keep this update to ourselves for long. Soon, you're going to be able to use the new portal system on your own helpdesk.

Let's go through the many benefits of the new portal.

Responsive design looks great on all devices

The old portal didn't always look great on smaller screens, like smartphones. We've redesigned the new portal from the ground up to use responsive design: in other words, the layout will change to fit whatever device you're viewing it on, whether that's a phone, a tablet, a small laptop or a giant monitor.

More informative ticket view for users

Not only does the new portal look better, but it's designed to deliver a better experience for your users.

Here's an example: now, when a user logs in, they will be notified of any new agent replies at the top of the portal.

The list of all a user's tickets also indicates more clearly when a ticket needs a response, as well as providing a lot more information about each ticket at a glance.

The view of an individual ticket has also been greatly improved. Now the user can change who is CC'd in to a ticket after it has been created.

More useful portal search

In the old portal, when you searched the portal as a user, the results included all types of portal content mixed together: News posts, Knowledgebase articles, Feedback items, and so on.

If your search term just happened to match a lot of News posts, they would dominate the search results - even if what you were looking for was a Knowledgebase article.

Now with the new system, different types of portal content are shown in separate sections, so it's easy to find the type of content you need.

You'll notice that search now includes the user's own tickets.

Easier, more powerful portal editor

We've redesigned the portal editor to give you finer control of exactly how your portal looks. Now you can edit details like font size and element positioning without needing to be a web designer, so it's easier to style your portal to fit with the rest of your brand.

We've moved the controls to turn sections of the portal on and off to a separate page, outside of the portal editor.

If you're taking advantage of DeskPRO's usergroup system to present different portal content to different users, you'll find you can easily preview what the portal will look like to any group.

If you do need to customise the portal at a deeper level, you still have the option to edit the portal templates. You'll find the new template system simpler and easier to understand, and the editing experience has been greatly improved with the addition of color syntax highlighting and auto-complete.

More abuse prevention options

Are wild spam robots submitting junk tickets and comments into your portal, wasting your time? The old portal had a bunch of options to prevent this with "enter these letters" CAPTCHA tests and rate limits. In the new system, you'll find we've put all the settings about this together in one convenient location.

We've also added the option to use Google's reCAPTCHA system, which can verify most humans without even needing them to complete a CAPTCHA challenge at all.

Improved ticket form

Submitting a new ticket from the portal is greatly improved.

All the input is stored as you type - just like in the agent interface - so if a user's browser crashes or they accidentally close the tab, they can continue right where they left off.

Users can drag and drop attachments to add them to a ticket, and even paste images straight into the ticket message - just like your agents can.

Better news for everyone

We've added the ability to provide translations for News posts, as you can for other portal content. Users can request email notifications when you publish posts, alongside the existing RSS feed option.

More engaging chat

By popular demand, we've added a great new "pro-active" chat feature which allows you to offer a greeting to your users or ask them a question, before they initiate a conversation with you.

This is a great way to make your customers who are looking for support feel that you're eager to help!

While we were improving chat, we also added an easy-to-use editor which allows you to customise how the chat widget looks and behaves. You can change the size and wording of the chat button, use custom colors, change the position and size of the chat window, and more.

Over to you

If you want to get a feel for how the new portal is better, please check out support.deskpro.com. If you spot any glitches, or have any questions about how the new portal will work on your helpdesk, email us right away at support@deskpro.com.

There's nothing more annoying than losing work because your browser crashed, or, still worse, because you accidentally closed the wrong tab, so you can't even blame the browser.

We hate that too. DeskPRO already automatically saves anything you type in the ticket reply box. Now, we've eliminated another potential frustration by adding automatic saving of your work while you're creating a ticket.

It's very simple to use: if you're creating a new ticket and something happens (whether that's your browser crashing, accidentally closing the browser tab that DeskPRO's open in, or accidentally closing the ticket tab within DeskPRO), just use New Ticket and you can carry on where you left off.

If you decide that you want to abandon what you've typed and start again, you'll notice that there's a Discard Draft button that will delete the ticket contents.

With Deskpro's snippets feature, your agents can quickly insert common phrases or "canned answers", and use variables to add a personalization, so the pre-written text can address each user by name or refer to details of their ticket.

To get the best out of snippets, it's important to write them carefully and only use them at the right time.

We've now added draft snippets, enabling you to create snippets which aren't shown by default.

You can now save a draft snippet and ask a couple of agents to review it, without making it visible to the rest of your agents until it's ready.

Another use for drafts is to hide snippets that are only useful at a certain time of year. No need to wade through all the snippets about your Easter product line to find the pumpkin spice FAQ.

Deskpro turbo-charges your agents with features to speed up everyday support tasks. Snippets let them quickly insert common phrases or "canned answers". Macros enable them to store several tasks and then carry them out with one click.

So you can ensure you're getting the most out of snippets and macros, we've now added snippet and macro usage reporting through Deskpro's existing powerful reports interface.

You'll find built-in reports about how often each snippet or macro is used on your helpdesk at the bottom of theTickets section.

Now you can see if your agents are making the best use of Deskpro's high productivity interface, or if more training is required. Real usage information also helps you plan new snippets and macros.

If you need a more specific question answered, the same usage information is now available in your custom reports. You'll find the new variables you need to do this documented in the Reports manual.

DeskPRO On-Premise admins, you can update your helpdesk now to get this feature. If you're a Deskpro Cloud customer, we'll be adding this to your helpdesk soon.

Deskpro's authentication apps enable your agents and users to log in to your helpdesk with their account details from other services, saving you time on password management.

We know that a lot of Deskpro helpdesks use authentication apps, so we're always looking for ways to improve them. We're pleased to announce two ways we've made our support for external authentication better.

Grant a usergroup

When you enable agents to log in with an authentication app, you can choose what permissions they are granted.

You couldn't do the same thing for users, until now. For each user authentication app, you can now pick a usergroup that users will automatically join when they log in.

Filter users

Suppose you have a database full of user records, but you only want to grant portal access to active subscribers; or you have an Active Directory containing records for everyone in your company, but you only want staff from the IT department to become agents.

We've now added a powerful filtering feature that lets you define which user records you want to use for DeskPRO authentication. You can create filters based on any information in your Active Directory, LDAP store, OneLogin, database or other external source.

If you're the system administrator for a Deskpro On-Premise installation, you'll naturally take the security of your helpdesk very seriously.

Deskpro uses a one-way hashing function to store all user, agent and admin account passwords. This means that the real passwords aren't ever stored in the database at all: just a mathematical 'fingerprint' that can be used to confirm the right password was entered, but can't be used to reconstruct it (short of spending decades crunching numbers on a supercomputer).

So even if some wrong-doers get hold of your database backups, they can't get anyone's password.

However, Deskpro can't use this hash technique to protect the passwords for your ticket email accounts. Your helpdesk has to provide the real password to your mail server or provider so it can download emails.

We've added a new option to the next version of Deskpro On-Premise which provides more security for your email account passwords.

In the new Server > Encryption section in the admin interface, you'll see an option to encrypt the stored passwords. The details are all explained there, but the up-shot is that this prevents anyone reading the passwords from the database or a backup.

On-Premise admins, update your helpdesk to the new version now to get this feature. (Cloud users, as always, don't have to worry about technical details like this - the way Cloud handles email access means it doesn't store your passwords).

For more information about the improved password security feature, see the Sysadmin manual.

Sometimes a single glitch can produce a flood of tickets. A server goes down or a shipment goes missing, and now dozens of your users have the same problem.

To make it easier to handle that sort of situation, we've added support for problems and incidents to Deskpro.

A problem is the underlying glitch: the burnt-out server or the missing shipping container.

A problem's incidents are simply the tickets generated by that problem.

(We've taken this terminology from IT support, but we think you'll find this feature useful no matter what you use Deskpro for).

Tracking problems produces the following benefits for your helpdesk:

If you get a sudden spike in incoming tickets, linking them to problems helps support staff understand the root causes and prioritise what to fix first.

You can use the new Problems & Incidents section in the filter pane to view all the tickets caused by a problem at a glance, updated in real time.

You can combine problems tracking with Deskpro's existing mass actions feature to message all the users affected by a problem to keep them updated, or resolve all the resulting incidents once the problem is closed - you can even personalise messages with variables; for example, ensure that each user is addressed by name.

You can use the Reports interface to analyse which problems are generating the most tickets.

You can close and reopen problems, so agents can always see which problems are actively causing trouble, even with intermittent problems.

We'll be rolling this feature out to all Cloud helpdesks shortly. On-Premise admins, you can update your installation to get it now.

When users email you directly, rather than writing to your support address, you can just forward their message to DeskPRO. DeskPRO is clever enough to process the forwarded email and make a ticket for the user based on the original message.

This makes for a fast and easy way to get emails into your helpdesk.

We've now added an option to make this feature even easier to use.

At the moment, when you forward an email into your helpdesk, anything above the forward gets processed as a message to the user. So if your email software adds a signature automatically, you have to remember to delete it - otherwise the user will get a short, enigmatic message with just your signature.

Of course, on a busy helpdesk, it's easy to forget to remove your signature.

If this is a problem you've run into, you'll be glad to know that we've added a setting to address this.